Tuesday, January 26, 2010

I’m trying to get an early start to gathering candidate information for the Calgary municipal election coming up in October this year. If you are planning to run, or have information about anyone who is going to run, please share. You can use the comments here, or contact me directly.

All of this is to be compiled and made freely available online through the next iteration of the Calgary Democracy Project.

Candidate Videos

I’m also open to starting on the candidate videos, if any candidates would like to have one done. The format is pretty straight-forward. The candidate sits in front of the camera, standard interview style, and is asked 3 questions:

Why are you running?

What do you consider to be key issues and how do you propose to address those issues?

Why should people vote for you?

The videos are kept to under 10 minutes (arbitrary YouTube time limit, but also the typical limit for how long people can attentively listen to one person talking).

The only editing done is to cut out the interviewer’s comments and asking of the questions (unless the candidate’s responses total more than 10 minutes, then the focus is on cutting it down to fit minimizing any impact to the content of what the candidate says).

These videos are an attempt to bypass the superficial and generally content-free view of candidates we get in the corporate media, hopefully making the candidates a bit more accessible to the public. By providing more than just a 30-second, out-of-context, sound-byte, the videos can hopefully help contribute to a better informed electorate.